Ancient World Bloggers Group (AWBG)

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

It seems to me that there is a growing emphasis on the damage being sustained to the archaeological record in Syria, but little on the solutions to prevent material derived from the looting being sold on the market. Some colleagues even deny that material is entering the market even when there is a growing body of evidence to suggest the contrary. There clearly needs to be an emphasis on training for those at ports and airports, intelligence driven interceptions, and prevention when material is offered for sale.

Provenance in an eBay World: Does the Provenance of Ancient Artifacts Matter?
11/23/2015
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: 303 (Level 3) - Hilton
Theme: Hosted by the Student Advisory Board
From Gospel of John papyrus fragments appearing on eBay to debates surrounding the origins of modern fragments (e.g., the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, or the new Sappho fragments), the provenance of antiquities has emerged as a challenging issue for scholars and students who work with material culture. This session aims to illuminate some of the stakes around the debate for graduate students. The panel will examine issues of working on materials kept in public and private collections, and highlight the individuals and institutions who are working to create policies and practices that address the issue of provenance. As of now, SBL has no formal policy on the provenance of antiquities, but is actively formulating one. It is the hope of the panel that graduate students will find this panel to be a networking opportunity and source of support for their future academic work.

Call for papers:
We invite colleagues all around the world and at all stages of their
careers to submit papers on the topic of “Digital Approaches and the
Ancient World” to a themed issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies.
The topic is to be construed as widely as possible, to include not only
the history, archaeology, language, literature and thought of the
ancient and late antique Mediterranean world, but also of antiquity more
widely, potentially including, for example, South and East Asian,
Sub-Saharan African or Pre-Columbian American history. Digital
approaches may also vary widely, to include methodologies from the
digital humanities and information studies, quantitative methods from
the hard sciences, or other innovative and transdisciplinary themes.

Papers will be fully peer reviewed and selected for inclusion based
not only on their research quality and significance, but especially on
their ability to engage profoundly both with classics/history academic
readers, and scholars from digital or informatic disciplines. We are
keen to see papers that clearly lay out their disciplinary and
interdisciplinary methodological approaches, and present and interpret
the full range of scholarly and practical outcomes of their research.

We encourage the use of and direct reference to open online datasets in your papers. BICS
is not currently an open access publication, but self-archiving of
pre-press papers is permitted, and the editors believe in the
transparency and accountability that comes with basing scientific work
on open data.

To submit an article to this themed issue, please send your full
paper of 4,000–8,000 words in Microsoft Word doc, docx or rtf format, to
<gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk>, along with a 150 word abstract, by January 31, 2016.
You do not need to follow BICS style for the initial submission, but
please note that the final version of accepted articles will need to be
formatted to adhere to our style guide (http://www.icls.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/STYLE-V15.pdf).

If you have any questions about this issue, please feel free to contact any of the editors informally.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

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http://projectmosul.itn-dch.net/

Project Mosul is a volunteer action by the fellows of the Initial Trianing Network for Digital Cultural Heritage (www.itn-dch.eu), a Marie Curie Actions training project that is part of the Seventh Framework Programme.

The fellows of the ITN-DCH are asking
Project Mosul:

Call For Action

We are looking for volunteers to help virtually restore the Mosul Museum. This includes finding photos, processing data, contributing to the website and generally helping out with organising the effort to identify the museum artefacts. If you can help, drop us a line here, or e-mail us directly at projectmosul@itn-dch.net.
For an example of how crowd-sourced images can help restore artefacts, check out this example here
Thanks!

How can I help?

Upload Pictures
We need pictures of the artefacts found in the Mosul Museum. These pictures allow us to digitally reconstruct the original artefacts, and can eventually aid in the restoration those artefacts. The more pictures the better, and as many angles and perspectives, even better still!
If you have pictures to contribute, search for the artefact in the list of artefacts and simply edit that artefact, adding your photos to the collection.

Develop the Web Platform
Know how to code in Ruby on Rails, Angular, or Go? Why not contribute to the web framework and help combat the destruction of ISIS with your coding skills. Visit the GitHub project page (https://github.com/neshmi/projectmosul) and check out the issues. Fork the repository, make a change and issue a pull request.

Mask Some Images
Our results will be improved if we can mask the artefacts in the images. Help us by masking some of the images in Photoshop (we are working on developing a web platform for the masking), save the mask in an alpha channel. This takes time, so the more hands we have the easier this task wll be!

Get the word out
Know someone who has visited Mosul? Let them know about the project. We need as many pictures from inside and outside the building, the more people we can reach the greater the possibilities are of virtual restoration.

Process an artefact!
Do you know how to use automated photogrammetry to create three-dimensional models? Help us by downloading some of the photosets and processing the images.

Project Mosul: A Manifesto
The video circulated around the 26th of February, 2015 shows the horrific destruction of the Mosul Museum by ISIS Fighters. This is not the first time this museum has suffered during times of conflict, but the destruction is nearly absolute, and this time we can respond through the application of digital technologies to cultural heritage.

We assume that much of the museum’s contents were looted, and anything small enough to be easily removed will be appearing soon on the antiquities market. Anything too large to remove for sale, appears to have met a violent end at the hand of ISIS extremists. In both cases, it is possible to virtually recreate the lost items through the application of photogrammetry and crowdsourcing. Given enough photographs, digital or scans of analogues, it is possible to reconstruct the artefacts and create digital surrogates of those artefacts. This provides two immediate benefits: helping to identify looted items and recreating destroyed items.

We propose to coordinate a volunteer effort of experts and amateurs in the crowdsourcing of the necessary digital imagery and the creation of digital surrogates for the artefacts in the museum. We would like to work with the local management of the Mosul Museum as much as possible, as well as with experts familiar with the collection and material. All data generated from this project will be freely available to the public.
This project is a direct response to the senseless destruction of cultural heritage by extremists, not only ISIS, but to any group who uses heritage as leverage or political power. Instead, we want to bring heritage back to life through digital tools, giving the public access to any destroyed heritage, starting with the Mosul Museum.

We ask for your support in this endeavour, a project we are voluntarily doing and hope that it will make heritage accessible to all the public.

Sincerely the undersigned:
Marinos Ioannides, project coordinator
Matthew L. Vincent, Early Stage Researcher
Chance M. Coughenour, Early Stage Researcher
Created by Matthew Vincent for the Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage
This website and project are volunteer effort by the fellows of the ITN-DCH project.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission, the European Union, the FP7 PEOPLE Programme, the Marie Cure Actions, the partners and the entire consortium of the project or any other financial backers of the ITN-DCH. We are grateful for their support, and the funding that makes it possible for us to undertake these sorts of volunteer actions to protect and preserve our heritage, within and outside of Europe.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Attitudes to Digital Data Sharing within Archaeology

This survey is for users of digital archaeological data services. It is
an attempt to gain a snapshot of the archaeological community’s current
attitude towards certain digital data sharing practices and tools. How
familiar are archaeologists with the practicalities and advantages of
Open Access and Open Data practice? Is Linked Data a methodology that
the community might consider using at some stage in the future? Or
perhaps it is already very much in use today? Is there such a thing as
the Semantic Web for archaeologists and if not, why not?
This survey has been compiled by Frank Lynam as part of his doctoral
research as a member of the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD programme at
Trinity College Dublin.

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About this Blog

AWBG is a place for posts and discussion about blogging the Ancient World. Particularly welcome are entries announcing real world events where bloggers can meet, planning and notice of virtual blogfests - when a group of bloggers are posting about the same topic, and other issues related to how bloggers go about their business.

Since this is a meta-blog, the list of links below currently includes sites that are similarly introspective about using technology to study some part of the Ancient World.